Branson made a mental note that the greyhound stadium was less than fifteen minutes’ walk from The Droveway, where Roxy Pearce was raped on Thursday night.
‘Do you have anything to prove you were there? Betting stubs? Anyone with you?
‘There was a bird I picked up.’ He stopped.
‘What was her name?’ Branson asked.
‘Yeah, well, that’s the thing. She’s married. Her husband was away for the night. I don’t think she’d be too happy, you know, having the Old Bill asking questions.’
‘Gone all moral, have we, Darren?’ Branson asked. ‘Suddenly developed a conscience?’
He was thinking, but did not say, that it was rather a strange coincidence that Roxy Pearce’s husband had been away that night too.
‘Not moral, but I don’t want to give you her name.’
‘Then you’d better deliver us some other proof that you were at the dogs, and during that time period.’
Spicer looked at them. He needed a smoke badly.
‘Do you mind telling me what this is about?
‘A series of sexual assaults have been committed in this city. We’re looking to eliminate people from our enquiries.’
‘So I’m a suspect?’
Branson shook his head. ‘No, but your release date on licence makes you a possible Person of Interest.’
He did not reveal to Spicer that his records had been checked for 1997-8, and they showed he had been released from prison just six days before the Shoe Man’s first suspected attack back then.
‘Let’s move on to yesterday. Can you account for where you were between 5 p.m. and 9 p.m.?’
Spicer was sure his face was burning. He felt boxed in, didn’t like the way these questions kept on coming. Questions he couldn’t answer. Yes, he could say exactly where he was at 5 p.m. yesterday. He was in a copse behind a house in Woodland Drive, Brighton’s so-called Millionaire’s Row, buying charlie from one of its residents. He doubted he’d live to see his next birthday if he so much as mentioned the address.
‘I was at the Albion game. Went for some drinks with a mate afterwards. Until curfew here, right? Came back and had me dinner, then went to bed.’
‘Crap game, wasn’t it?’ Nick Nicholl said.
‘Yeah, that second goal, like…’ Spicer raised his hands in despair and sniffed again.
‘Your mate got a name?’ Glenn Branson asked.
‘Nah. You know, that’s a funny thing. See him about, known him for years – yet I still don’t know his name. Not the sort of thing you can ask someone after you’ve been drinking with them on and off for ten years, is it?’
‘Why not?’ Nicholl asked.
Spicer shrugged.
There was a long silence.
Branson flipped his notebook over a page. ‘Lock-up here is 8.30 p.m. I’m told you arrived back at 8.45 p.m., your voice was slurred and your pupils dilated. You were lucky they let you back in. Residents are forbidden to take drugs.’
‘I don’t take no drugs, Detective, sir.’ He sniffed again.
‘I’ll bet you don’t. You’ve just got a bad head cold, right?’
‘Right. Must be what it is. Exactly right. A bad head cold!’
Branson nodded. ‘I’ll bet you still believe in Father Christmas, don’t you?’
Spicer gave him a sly grin, unsure quite where this was going. ‘Father Christmas? Yeah. Yeah, why not?’
‘Next year write and ask him for a sodding handkerchief.’
53
Sunday 11 January
Yac did not drive the taxi on Sundays because he was otherwise engaged.
He had heard people use that expression and he liked it. Otherwise engaged. It had a nice ring to it. He liked, sometimes, to say things that had a nice ring to them.
‘Why don’t you ever take the cab out on Sunday nights?’ the man who owned the taxi had asked him recently.
‘Because I’m otherwise engaged,’ Yac replied importantly.
And he was. He had important business that filled his Sundays from the moment he got up until late into the night.
It was late at night now.
His first duty every Sunday morning was to check the houseboat for leaks, both from below the waterline and from the roof. Then he cleaned the houseboat. It was the cleanest floating home in all of Shoreham. Then he fastidiously cleaned himself. He was the cleanest, best-shaven taxi driver in the whole of Brighton and Hove.
When the owners of Tom Newbound finally came back from living in India, Yac hoped they would be proud of him. Maybe they would continue to let him live here with them, if he agreed to clean the boat every Sunday morning.
He so much hoped that. And he had nowhere else to go.
One of his neighbours told Yac the boat was so clean he could eat off the deck, if he wanted to. Yac didn’t understand that. Why would he want to? If he put food on the deck, gulls would come and eat it. Then he’d have the mess of food and gulls on the deck, and he’d have to clean all that up as well. So he ignored that suggestion.
He had learned over the years that it was wise to ignore suggestions. Most suggestions came from idiots. Intelligent people kept their thoughts to themselves.
His next task, in between making his hourly cups of tea and eating his Sunday dinner – always the same meal, microwaved lasagne – was removing his childhood collection of high-flush toilet chains from their hiding place in the bilges. Tom Newbound, he had discovered, provided him with several good hiding places. His collection of shoes was in some of them.
He liked to take his time laying the chains out on the floor of the saloon. First, he would count them to make sure that no one had been on the boat when he was out and stolen any of them. Then he would inspect them, to check there were no rust spots. Then he would clean them, lovingly rubbing each of the chain links with metal polish.
After he had put the chains carefully away, Yac would go on the Internet. He would spend the rest of the afternoon on Google Earth, checking for changes from his maps. That was something he had realized. Maps changed, just like everything else. You couldn’t depend on them. You couldn’t depend on anything. The past was shifting sand. Stuff that you read and learned and stored away in your head could – and did – get changed. Just because you knew something once did not mean it was still true today. Like with maps. You couldn’t be a good taxi driver just from relying on maps. You had to keep up to date, up to the minute!
It was the same with technology.
Things you knew five or ten or fifteen years ago weren’t always any good today. Technology changed. He had a whole filing cabinet on the boat filled with wiring diagrams of burglar alarm systems. He liked to work them out. He liked to find the flaws in them. A long time ago he had figured out that if a human being designed something, there would be a flaw in it somewhere. He liked to store those flaws away in his head. Information was knowledge and knowledge was power!
Power over all those people who thought he was no good. Who sneered or laughed at him. He could tell, sometimes, that people in his cab were laughing at him. He could see them in the mirror, sitting on the back seat smirking and whispering to each other about him. They thought he was a bit soft in the head. Potty. Doolally. Oh yes.
Uh-huh.
The way his mother did.
She made the same mistake. She thought he was stupid. She did not know that some days, or nights, when she
